


some far-off star

by frith_in_thorns



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 16:26:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/420926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When we die we come back different. Like, with greener eyes, or as some far-off star. (You'll be someone you wouldn't understand.)"</p>
            </blockquote>





	some far-off star

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of a challenge to use quotes from [a softer world](http://www.asofterworld.com) as prompts. And Elizabeth deserved a better ending.

_You…_

You drift, turn and turn and tumble, so slowly. You are between stars, between lights and in the darkness. Endless night, if that were a concept which holds meaning out here.

Maybe you were dead, for a while. When there is absolute cold and your very neurones freeze, surely that is death if anything is. But you are waking from it, Spring coming even though you are millions of miles from any season. You are _you_ , and you remember, slowly. So slowly.

This is a truth, this is the oldest truth in the universe: there are no fixed points in space. Everything, every object, every piece of matter is in motion, in flux, swept and spun and tugged by gravity's infinite currents and curves.

And so here at last (which implies an ending) you turn towards a sun, and you marvel at the blue-and-green jewel of a planet rolling beneath you. Green, which means life, which means life almost at the tips of your fingers.

How long have you been drifting unaware through night? No way of knowing. Years, decades, maybe centuries or even longer, and you would laugh if you had air to carry it because you've done this dance before. Only, that was a different body. A different you.

Whoever _Elizabeth_ is now (because you are not her, you know this for certain although when you ceased to be the same is a mystery) she is, will always be, a traveller.

And you are alone again, your machine-born brothers and sisters scattered, undoubtedly strewn across solar systems. _There are no fixed points._ But there is life below you which is the first in so long and maybe you would cry, if you could.

The world turns. Blue and green and blue and ice. It grows, slowly, and you warm, slowly, circuits unfreezing, systems restarting. A yellow star eases over the horizon and there is a sunset in red and violet and gold, and a sunrise.

You could be going home. If _home_ were not a concept that lost meaning some while ago.

And you wonder if you should be afraid.

In the end, you aren't.

You can _feel_ the atmosphere, which is both wonderful and terrifying. Friction drags at you, molecules of air clinging and being torn away, torn past. And they begin to glow, red and orange, your feet and fingers trailing comet-plumes, and the air ignites and flares around you, gold and white and gold and you burn.

There is glory and glory and you _burn_. You are a flame, a candle, an incandescence. 

You burn gold, a star, glorious as you fall. _(Make a wish.)_

\- - - 

In the water, the mud, the dim secret places where life and stories and histories form.

You.

In the mud the nano-machines which were your organs, your tissues, your cells, your molecules lie scattered. And you… They…

They group, and form, and _are_.

Becoming something new.


End file.
